Fortix Review

Way back in the dark ages of 1981, Taito America Corporation came out with an arcade game that utterly fascinated me as a kid. The game was called Qix, and boasted a very simple premise. Your aim was to block in a certain percentage of the game board by drawing closed shapes in the playing field. The catch was a massive creature bouncing throughout the level (a series of horizontal lines called a Qix), along with Sparx which crawled around the edges of shapes. If the Qix touched you while you were in the middle of drawing or a Sparx hit you, game over!

Perhaps the game appealed to my love of drawing (this was long before I ever knew the wonders of Photoshop). Or perhaps I just loved the peaceful order and logic of enclosing the world in little boxes. Whatever the case, I was absolutely terrified of the Qix, and spent many a quarter scrambling away from the relentless, pulsating horror of those six creepy lines.

Qix has lived on in various little known incarnations across a variety of platforms since its debut, but it Fortix consists of a dozen levels distributed on an overland map. As you conquer levels you will at times be given limited choices as to which land to tackle next, but this decision is irrelevant in the larger scheme of things since you

The premise of Fortix is pretty simple. As your knight moves, he trails a shimmering line behind him. When he closes a shape, the enclosed area turns a different shade and all lines turn black, indicating a

Threats to your quest include towers, which appear on every map and fire cannons towards you at regular intervals. There are two ways to stop them

Dragons are the next biggest threat, and they come in several varieties. The basic green dragons simply fly around randomly and pay you no heed. As long as you are careful they can be dodged easily. Grey dragons are tougher in that they can sense when you are off of your base line and turn to come after you. The toughest beast, however, is the black dragon. They can not only sense when you